Art Makes You Smart: Art Education with Sociology

GRAY MATTER

Art Makes You Smart

Alain Pilon

By BRIAN KISIDA, JAY P. GREENE and DANIEL H. BOWEN

Published: November 23, 2013

FOR many education advocates, the arts are a panacea: They supposedly increase test scores, generate social responsibility and turn around failing schools. Most of the supporting evidence, though, does little more than establish correlations between exposure to the arts and certain outcomes. Research that demonstrates a causal relationship has been virtually nonexistent.

A few years ago, however, we had a rare opportunity to explore such relationships when the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Artopened in Bentonville, Ark. Through a large-scale, random-assignment study of school tours to the museum, we were able to determine that strong causal relationships do in fact exist between arts education and a range of desirable outcomes.

Students who, by lottery, were selected to visit the museum on a field trip demonstrated stronger critical thinking skills, displayed higher levels of social tolerance, exhibited greater historical empathy and developed a taste for art museums and cultural institutions.

Crystal Bridges, which opened in November 2011, was founded by Alice Walton, the daughter of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart. It is impressive, with 50,000 square feet of gallery space and an endowment of more than $800 million.

Thanks to a generous private gift, the museum has a program that allows school groups to visit at no cost to students or schools.

Before the opening, we were contacted by the museum’s education department. They recognized that the opening of a major museum in an area that had never had one before was an unusual event that ought to be studied. But they also had a problem. Because the school tours were being offered free, in an area where most children had very little prior exposure to cultural institutions, demand for visits far exceeded available slots. In the first year alone, the museum received applications from 525 school groups requesting tours for more than 38,000 students.

As social scientists, we knew exactly how to solve this problem. We partnered with the museum and conducted a lottery to fill the available slots. By randomly assigning school tours, we were able to allocate spots fairly. Doing so also created a natural experiment to study the effects of museum visits on students, the results of which we published in the journals Education Next and Educational Researcher.

Over the course of the following year, nearly 11,000 students and almost 500 teachers participated in our study, roughly half of whom had been selected by lottery to visit the museum. Applicant groups who won the lottery constituted our treatment group, while those who did not win an immediate tour served as our control group.

Several weeks after the students in the treatment group visited the museum, we administered surveys to all of the students. The surveys included multiple items that assessed knowledge about art, as well as measures of tolerance, historical empathy and sustained interest in visiting art museums and other cultural institutions. We also asked them to write an essay in response to a work of art that was unfamiliar to them.

These essays were then coded using a critical-thinking-skills assessment program developed by researchers working with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

Further, we directly measured whether students are more likely to return to Crystal Bridges as a result of going on a school tour. Students who participated in the study were given a coupon that gave them and their families free entry to a special exhibit at the museum. The coupons were coded so that we could determine the group to which students belonged. Students in the treatment group were 18 percent more likely to attend the exhibit than students in the control group.

Moreover, most of the benefits we observed are significantly larger for minority students, low-income students and students from rural schools — typically two to three times larger than for white, middle-class, suburban students — owing perhaps to the fact that the tour was the first time they had visited an art museum.

Further research is needed to determine what exactly about the museum-going experience determines the strength of the outcomes. How important is the structure of the tour? The size of the group? The type of art presented?

Clearly, however, we can conclude that visiting an art museum exposes students to a diversity of ideas that challenge them with different perspectives on the human condition. Expanding access to art, whether through programs in schools or through visits to area museums and galleries, should be a central part of any school’s curriculum.

Brian Kisida is a senior research associate and Jay P. Greene is a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas. Daniel H. Bowen is a postdoctoral fellow at the Kinder Institute of Rice University.

TRAVEL: Jerusalem, a Beautiful Photographed Film

Try using the link at the bottom of this comment to see a video on the City of Jerusalem.  Includes aerial photography, brilliant colors and stunning perspectives of a land few have seen from such vantage points.
For people who like to travel or just imagine the site that they may never see with their own eyes.

http://vimeo.com/15034110

Changing Your View of the World Through Art

by Kenneth Baker

October 26, 2013

The answer to a single question can confirm the significance of an art exhibition: Do you see the world differently - even for a moment - after visiting it?

"David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition," opening Saturday at the de Young Museum, passes that test. Golden Gate Park, half steeped in fog, never looked as symphonically green to me as it did after I exited the Hockney show.

Not only does he make vivid a startling range of green hues in landscape paintings, but his drawings - even those made on an iPad - continually probe for marks, textures and patterns to register nature's details.

That, at one level, may be the essence of observational drawing. The show's last rooms contain charcoal landscape drawings Hockney made outdoors, and inkjet enlargements of them, describing from five woodland vantage points "The Arrival of Spring in 2013 (twenty thirteen)" in Britain's East Yorkshire, where he has lived intermittently in recent years.

In making these images, Hockney worked without color - "of course, the Chinese thought you could get every color from black and white," he said in conversation at his Los Angeles studio - finding graphic equivalents not only for physical detail but for the changing play of light and shade across shifts in weather and time of day.

Careful viewers will find their eyes taking up that challenge unconsciously as they study the drawings. And responsive visitors' minds will carry the search for adequate graphic notation into the de Young's park surround. For a while, every branch and leaf will seem to trigger it.

The quandaries of pictorial representation have driven Hockney's whole career, of which "A Bigger Exhibition" samples only the past decade.

The confident execution of the first works we encounter makes it seem that Hockney never struggles. But he has included here something that deliberately contradicts that impression. The second large room at the de Young opens with a wryly labored watercolor on seven connected pages titled "The Massacre and the Problems of Depiction" (2003). The top six sheets, framed together, include a remake of Picasso's frankly terrible 1951 Korean War protest picture and backfired homage to Goya, "Massacre in Korea."

Abutting the watercolor at the bottom, almost like a label, is a separately framed watercolor image of a man shrouded by the tent of an antique camera pointed at "The Massacre." Hockney has somehow made the faceless photographer figure suggest a self-portrait.

The first-referenced "problem of depiction," of how to picture something, was Picasso's: He could not make style and sentiment connect in his politically motivated "Massacre" - he didn't even come close.

The second was Hockney's. He has not made his satirical picture justify the effort, no matter how facile, spent on it.

The third and fourth problems: how to reprise another master's work - as Picasso failed to do in this case. Hockney has made no secret of his competitive feelings toward Picasso. Having tried to undo pictorial art's obsession with illusions of deep space based on perspective geometry, Hockney naturally hopes to supersede Picasso, who did it first through collage and cubism.

Camera as symbol

Finally, the camera symbolizes yet more "problems of depiction," having resolved automatically certain difficulties of transcribing appearances and thus, in Hockney's view, locking us into a limited understanding of how seeing is experienced, as if we saw everything with a single eye, like a camera lens, rather than two.

He has tried by various means to unsettle that understanding - most dramatically through four nine-screen videos, "Woldgate Wood" (2011), which enfold visitors at the center of "A Bigger Exhibition."

But Hockney's main tactic in trying to break the complacency of vision and our thinking about it has been shifts in emphasis. These appear throughout the de Young survey.

Watercolor works

The show opens with a string of notional watercolors - self-portraits, still lifes, window views, followed by a chain of deft watercolor portraits.

Watercolor technique can become precious - think of John Singer Sargent at his most florid - but Hockney's is practical. He seeks the most resourceful solution to every descriptive challenge.

He shows us, incidentally, that a portrait succeeds not by being a good likeness of someone but by being a good likeness compared to other portraits whose truth we accept, for whatever reason.

Yet no trace of caricature enters the show until you round a second corner inside the entrance and see a series of landscapes Hockney painted in Iceland. Here he has resorted to all sorts of abbreviation and exaggeration to communicate the impact of what he saw, as if only overstatement could convey it.

The almost Fauvist color that enters many of Hockney's paintings of East Yorkshire may owe something to the blatant palette of the iPhone and iPad apps that he used to produce drawings.

Some of the iPad drawings displayed on large screens show us something truly new: computer playback of a drawing's formation, color by color, line by line. The decisions guiding the process may still remain mysterious, but seeing the process playing out - seemingly by itself - is even more like seeing through someone else's eyes than looking at finished representational art.

Hockney might seem an odd choice for the largest exhibition ever in San Francisco's Fine Arts Museums. But on at least two grounds it makes sense: The Bay Area has a deep history of interest in and production of figurative art, and Hockney's work has much to teach us about observation and depiction that links to the long history of art.

David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition: Paintings, works on paper and video. Through Jan. 20. De Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, S.F. (415) 750-3600.www.deyoungmuseum.org.

Kenneth Baker is The San Francisco Chronicle's art critic

Is Music the Key to Success? An Opinion Piece

OPINION

Is Music the Key to Success?

By JOANNE LIPMAN

Published: October 12, 2013

Some Excerpts from the longer piece:

CONDOLEEZZA RICE trained to be a concert pianist. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, was a professional clarinet and saxophone player. The hedge fund billionaire Bruce Kovner is a pianist who took classes at Juilliard.

Enlarge This Image

Anna Parini

Multiple studies link music study to academic achievement. But what is it about serious music training that seems to correlate with outsize success in other fields?

The connection isn’t a coincidence. I know because I asked. I put the question to top-flight professionals in industries from tech to finance to media, all of whom had serious (if often little-known) past lives as musicians. Almost all made a connection between their music training and their professional achievements.

The phenomenon extends beyond the math-music association. Strikingly, many high achievers told me music opened up the pathways to creative thinking. And their experiences suggest that music training sharpens other qualities: Collaboration. The ability to listen. A way of thinking that weaves together disparate ideas. The power to focus on the present and the future simultaneously.

Look carefully and you’ll find musicians at the top of almost any industry. Woody Allen performs weekly with a jazz band. The television broadcaster Paula Zahn (cello) and the NBC chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd (French horn) attended college on music scholarships; NBC’s Andrea Mitchell trained to become a professional violinist. Both Microsoft’s Mr. Allen and the venture capitalist Roger McNamee have rock bands. Larry Page, a co-founder of Google, played saxophone in high school. Steven Spielberg is a clarinetist and son of a pianist. The former World Bank president James D. Wolfensohn has played cello at Carnegie Hall.

Mr. Todd says there is a connection between years of practice and competition and what he calls the “drive for perfection. . . . . .  He adds that his cello performance background helps him work collaboratively: “Ensemble playing trains you, quite literally, to play well with others, to know when to solo and when to follow.”

For many of the high achievers I spoke with, music functions as a “hidden language,” as Mr. Wolfensohn calls it, one that enhances the ability to connect disparate or even contradictory ideas. When he ran the World Bank, Mr. Wolfensohn traveled to more than 100 countries, often taking in local performances (and occasionally joining in on a borrowed cello), which helped him understand “the culture of people, as distinct from their balance sheet.”

It’s in that context that the much-discussed connection between math and music resonates most. Both are at heart modes of expression. Bruce Kovner, the founder of the hedge fund Caxton Associates and chairman of the board of Juilliard, says he sees similarities between his piano playing and investing strategy; as he says, both “relate to pattern recognition, and some people extend these paradigms across different senses.”

Mr. Kovner and the concert pianist Robert Taub both describe a sort of synesthesia — they perceive patterns in a three-dimensional way. Mr. Taub, who gained fame for his Beethoven recordings and has since founded a music software company, MuseAmi, says that when he performs, he can “visualize all of the notes and their interrelationships,” a skill that translates intellectually into making “multiple connections in multiple spheres.”

Woody Allen:   Still, he practices the clarinet at least half an hour every day, because wind players will lose their embouchure (mouth position) if they don’t: “If you want to play at all you have to practice. I have to practice every single day to be as bad as I am.” He performs regularly, even touring internationally with his New Orleans jazz band. “I never thought I would be playing in concert halls of the world to 5,000, 6,000 people,” he says. “I will say, quite unexpectedly, it enriched my life tremendously.”

“I’ve always believed the reason I’ve gotten ahead is by outworking other people,” he says. It’s a skill learned by “playing that solo one more time, working on that one little section one more time,” and it translates into “working on something over and over again, or double-checking or triple-checking.” He adds, “There’s nothing like music to teach you that eventually if you work hard enough, it does get better. You see the results.”

That’s an observation worth remembering at a time when music as a serious pursuit — and music education — is in decline in this country.

Consider the qualities these high achievers say music has sharpened: collaboration, creativity, discipline and the capacity to reconcile conflicting ideas. All are qualities notably absent from public life. Music may not make you a genius, or rich, or even a better person. But it helps train you to think differently, to process different points of view — and most important, to take pleasure in listening.        

To read more, try this link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/opinion/sunday/is-music-the-key-to-success.html?pagewanted=2

Dance, Gynmastics, Ballet?

Contortionist's amazing feat with amazing feet

Mike Kepka, The Chronicle

Inka Siefker works on her contortion archery technique at the Royal Russian Kung Fu Circus Training Academy of Heaven Mountain in San Francisco.

By Mike Kepka

August 26, 2013

A recent Friday, 2:31 p.m.: Inka Siefker was packed and ready for a
much-anticipated vacation to Paris when she got the call. A new reality TV 
show featuring potential Guinness World Records challengers invited her 
to try to break the mark for long-distance archery by a contortionist firing 
an arrow with her feet.

The only catch was that she needed to be in Los Angeles in 10 days for a
 taping before an audience of 200 people. And that she'd never tried the 
distance needed to break the record in front of anyone except her training 
partner and teacher.

"I'd never even done it onstage before, let alone a live audience," 
said Siefker, 26.

She took her vacation to Paris, but spent most of it doing something 
few tourists do - shooting arrows while performing handstands.

It wasn't until she was 21 that Siefker moved to San Francisco from a 
small town in Mississippi to learn contortion and circus arts, but the seed 
had been planted early on. When she was 2, she started competitive dance 
class and gymnastics. She also did ballet and played softball and tennis. 
She has been athletic all her life.

Now she makes a living warping her body in strange ways at San Francisco 
clubs like the Monarch in the South of Market neighborhood.

Siefker's basic trick is a mainstay of Mongolian contortion - contortion is big in 
Mongolia - and involves doing a handstand while pulling back a 12-pound, 
recurve bow with her toes, loading an arrow and firing.

The Guinness mark was 18 feet for piercing a balloon fixed to a 4-inch bull's-eye. 
Siefker was going to try for 20 feet.

When she got to the soundstage in L.A., she was nervous. "I've done it at 30 feet, 
but it's just a matter of having Guinness World Record representatives
breathing down my neck," she said.

Mike Kepka, The Chronicle

Inka Siefker practices shooting an arrow with her feet, hoping to break her own record.

Siefker has extreme focus when it comes to her contortion practice. She spends as much time warming up, both physically and mentally, as she does actually shooting. Everything has to be calm.

Because she can't look down the line of the arrow while she is standing on her hands - the arrow is at least a foot or two above her 
head - she needs to approximate its 
distance from the target. She has a process, but she won't reveal it - it's "top secret."

And even when everything comes together, Siefker says, she hits the target 
only 1 out of 4 tries.

The Guinness show insisted she get there early in the morning for hairstyling 
and makeup, and then there was a lot of hurry up and wait. Production people 
kept asking how many chances she needed to make this thing happen. 
That only made her all the more stressed.

The show's producers decided three chances was about right. They gave her 
five minutes to check out the target and the stage - then the crew took another 
hour before finally being ready.

"I'm just like standing next to the platform while they're filming all this 
other stuff," Siefker said. "By the time I got on the platform, I was like,
 'All right, I'm ready to go. Let just do it!'

Mike Kepka, The Chronicle

Siefker's basic trick involves doing a handstand while pulling back a bow with her toes, loading an arrow and firing.

"I put my hand on the floor and kicked into the handstand," Siefker said. "I'd really practiced so hard. I pulled back the arrow and lined it up. ... I held it there for just another second and released the arrow.

"My heart dropped." Pop! went the balloon.

Suddenly, the girl who ran away from Bailey, Miss., to be a contortionist
and circus performer was a world-record holder.

"Everyone was cheering," she said. "Legitimate cheering 
- it wasn't just TV holding up a 
sign for applause."

She added, "I couldn't believe I had done that."

It was her Uncle David who was proudest of her. 
When she was 
a little girl, he took her hunting in Mississippi and 
taught her most of 
what she knows about archery.

"We would set up all sorts of ridiculous targets and 
shoot at them," 
Siefker said.

Now she is trying to one-up herself. Three or four 
days a week, 
she works out at a club in the Excelsior district - the 
Royal Russian 
Kung Fu Circus Training Academy of Heaven 
Mountain. She's determined
 to beat her own record.

"I can always do more. I'm never settled," she said. 
"The next level is to 
do it blindfolded from 30 feet.

"I just want to make people believe in impossible things."

To see a multimedia production of this piece, go to 
http://blog.sfgate.com/cityexposed. If you have ideas
 for the 
City Exposed, e-mail Mike Kepka at 
mkepka@sfchronicle.com.

Robert N. Bellah dies - UC Berkeley professor

Megan Messerly, UC Berkeley

UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus Robert N. Bellah, who died July 30, was best known for the 1985 best-selling book "Habits of the Heart."

Megan Messerly

August 9, 2013

Robert N. Bellah, a UC Berkeley professor renowned for exploring the intimate
relationship between American society and religious identity, died July 30 in Oakland. 
He was 86.

His death was caused by complications of heart surgery, the university said of its 
professor emeritus of sociology.

In his 1967 essay, "Civil Religion in America," Professor Bellah posited the idea
that "civil religion," a nonsectarian, abstract faith, binds together the fabric of American 
society - a concept for which he won acclaim within the sociological community.

"He was moving toward a powerful critique of global cultural experience," said Ann Swidler, 
a colleague of Professor Bellah's in the sociology department at UC Berkeley. 
"He is kind of a demigod in the world of sociology."

Although Professor Bellah wrote or collaborated on more than a dozen books, the 1985
best-seller "Habits of the Heart" leaves perhaps the most lasting legacy in academic and
popular circles.

In the book, which sold almost 500,000 copies in its first decade of publication, Bellah 
and his four co-authors explore contemporary society and the beliefs that shape it
through a survey of middle-class Americans.

On Wednesday, Professor Bellah's four co-authors met at UC Berkeley to partake in 
an annual tradition that began after "Habits" was published, coming together for a couple 
of days to discuss their most recent research.

This year, they remembered Professor Bellah and discussed his most recent work 
- papers that would have constituted core sections of his new book about modernity, 
said Swidler, one of the co-authors.

"There is a line from Aeschylus he loved: 'Time in its aging course teaches all things,' " 
said "Habits" co-author Steven M. Tipton, a professor of sociology and religion at 
Emory University in Atlanta. "The well of the past is deep, and from it Bob drew
 practical wisdom and living water."

Robert Neelly Bellah was born Feb. 23, 1927, in Altus, Okla., where his father was
 the editor and publisher of the local newspaper. When he was 2 years old, Professor 
Bellah's father died and the family moved to Los Angeles.

Professor Bellah's wife, Melanie, died in 2010. He is survived by two daughters, 
Hally Bellah-Guther of Berkeley and Jennifer Bellah Maguire of Los Angeles; a sister,
 Hallie Bellah Reynolds; and five grandchildren.

In 2000, Professor Bellah was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President 
Bill Clinton for his contributions to sociological research on American society.

But for all of Professor Bellah's praise from the academic community, colleagues who
knew him personally say he was a "regular person" who happened to be "smarter than 
most people - and philosophically trained."

Every Sunday, Professor Bellah dined with Bellah-Guther, whose three children often
performed concerts for their classical-music-loving grandfather on the piano and cello.

"Sometimes these brilliant people can be harsh in personal lives, but he was a very loving,
generous, kind person," she said. "Every day, every single time I've been with my dad, 
he inspired me by telling me what he was thinking about what he was reading."

A memorial service for Professor Bellah will be held at 2 p.m. Aug. 20 at All Souls 
Episcopal Parish in Berkeley.

Megan Messerly is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail:mmesserly@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @meganmesserly

Expansion of Major Natural History Museum

Beyond dioramas - nature's new story in museums

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN, New York Times

August 8, 2013

Los Angeles -- - The traditional natural history museum is powerful and familiar, but it is also strange. It is weighty, ponderous, pieced together from relics of lost worlds. It evolved in the 19th century, displaying the geological cataclysms that molded the Earth's surface, the creatures that clambered into habitats and the indigenous cultures that were once considered closer to nature. No other museum genre has changed so glacially.

But the pace of evolution has been quickening. Last month, just in time for its centennial this fall, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County completed a $135 million multiyear refashioning: a transformation that has doubled its program space and added new exhibitions and reworked others, including a mammals hall in 2010 and a compelling dinosaur hall in 2011.

Its new entrance is a six-story-high glass pavilion designed by CO Architects in which a hanging skeleton of a 63-foot-long fin whale is silhouetted by 33,000 LED lights. Outside, a 3.5-acre "urban wilderness" designed by Mia Lehrer & Architects has replaced concrete parking lots. Some 31,000 plantings and a 27,000-gallon pond lure dragonflies and hummingbirds, while a curving stone wall harbors smaller samplings of urban wildlife.

Indoors, other examples of the region's creatures - including tarantulas, harvester ants and rats - appear as part of a new interactive Nature Lab that readily attracts parents along with their charges. And in what may be the greatest departure from archetype, "Becoming L.A.," a permanent 14,000-square-foot exhibition - the largest in the museum - surveys the history of Los Angeles.

But what kind of evolution is this, and what does it portend? Unlike the new Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, the Los Angeles museum has not embraced the style of the contemporary "science center." Under the guidance of the institution's president, Jane G. Pisano, its natural history heritage is preserved as well as transformed.

A T. rex and a Tourist

The stunning dioramas that were mounted in the 1920s and '30s remain graciously intact. So do the museum's greatest fossils. The original 1913 Beaux-Arts rotunda still makes its antique promise of nobility and grandeur. What natural history museum, though, would display, as we find here, one of the first crucifixes to make its way to California in the 18th century? Or the carefully scuffed shoes and torn clothes of Charlie Chaplin's tramp from "City Lights"? And while we would expect to see the skeletal remnants of a baby Tyrannosaurus, why the chassis of an equally extinct Tourist, a 1902 wooden car that was the best-selling automobile in California before World War I?

Including those items is part of the museum's effort at redefinition, although the curators were drawing on an eccentric set of collections that were never really part of the natural history tradition. 

To read more:  

http://www.sfchronicle.com/science/article/Beyond-dioramas-nature-s-new-story-in-museums-4715681.php

Igniting Youthful Interest in Science and Technology

Bringing out minority youths' Hidden Genius

Ian C. Bates, The Chronicle

Matthew Wardenaar of Tagged (right) gives Mohammed Abdulla a hand with Google Glass during a session of the Hidden Genius Project, formed by technology professionals, nonprofits and educators to give underrepresented minorities guidance in moving toward STEM education and the tech sector.

By James Temple

July 28, 2013

On Friday morning, a group of black teenage boys sat around
a conference-room table in North Beach,
MacBook Airs open, as they debated the
best way to code the Fibonacci Sequence.

It's a classic problem of computer science,
figuring out an algorithm that spits out
a series of numbers generated by adding up
the two preceding ones: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8,
13, 21 and so on.

The lesson wasn't simply designed to teach
the high school students the Python
programming language they were working in.
It was calibrated to get them to think logically,
so that they can eventually work in any
 language.

Their mentor, developer and entrepreneur
Kurt Collins, guided the discussion with a 
delicate blend of sarcasm, wit and tough love.
At one point he made Johnnel White, going into
his sophomore year at Vallejo High School, 
erase the formula he'd carefully transcribed
from his laptop onto the whiteboard.

"If you understand the logic, you don't have to
memorize it," he said.

The students are members of the Hidden Genius
Project, an initiative formed last year by nine
technology professionals, nonprofit executives
and teachers who wanted to steer more minorities
into the growing and often lucrative industry.

http://www.sfchronicle.com/technology/dotcommentary/article/Bringing-out-minority-youths-Hidden-Genius-4691049.php

Use the link above to read more about this
education offering for teenagers.  But now,
back to the problem:

Let's have the Haggin Museum docents and 
friends consider the implications here, then 
we'll take a stab at the problem.  John Dierking
could probably weigh in on this too.

Solving the problem:

To create a program that produces the Fibonacci
series of numbers, advise your teenagers that they 
should always ask a question like this of their 
programming instructors.  "What should our 
program OUTPUT look like?"  The output is simply 
a printout of the results after the program runs 
and finally arrives at the step to print out a sheet 
of numbers.  You'd be surprised how some 
instructors forget to tell you what output is desirable 
as the final product.  Let's assume that we want 
a sheet of printed numbers like the one above:

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 and so on.  Or, printed 
vertically down the page as we will choose to do here.

In programming languages, your student is allowed 
to "declare a variable".  This puts a God-like power 
in your student because a student can simply say, 
"The variable X now exists!"  or "The variable, 
RESULT, now exists!"  Let's continue with RESULT.  
If you say RESULT exists, it therefore does exist 
simply because you said so!  In a running program, 
the human speaks commands to the machine, 
sort of like this.  "I have written the command,  
RESULT=0."  The machine responds, upon reading 
your command, by reserving a place in its memory 
called RESULT.  It stays silently hidden from view
in the memory and carries a value of 0  (zero).  
Now let's try to imagine the program as it might look 
while actually working:

FIRST NUMBER = 0

SECOND NUMBER = 1

RESULT = FIRST NUMBER + SECOND NUMBER
(Notice here that we just created a variable called 
RESULT simply by saying that it's name is RESULT 
and that it has a value equal to 0+1,  which is 1.)

PRINTOUT FIRST NUMBER    (a zero gets printed)

PRINTER GO TO THE NEXT BLANK LINE DOWN 
AND WAIT

PRINTOUT SECOND NUMBER    (a 1 gets printed)   
Now we'll skip the commands to the printer and 
assume we go down a line after each number is printed,
otherwise it's tedious to say all that here.  Look back 
at the Fibonacci numbers to realize that we are trying 
to make the machine work its way from left to right 
and also actively create the next rung in its left to right,
increasing, ladder.

FIRST NUMBER =SECOND NUMBER  
(FIRST NUMBER is now 1 and no longer zero)

RESULT = FIRST NUMBER + SECOND NUMBER
so RESULT is now 2.          (1 +1=2)

FIRST NUMBER = SECOND NUMBER   (1 is still 1)

SECOND NUMBER = RESULT  (SECOND 
NUMBER now 2)

RESULT = FIRST NUMBER + SECOND NUMBER  
or 1+2=3)         RESULT has a value of 3.

FIRST NUMBER=SECOND NUMBER  
( FIRST becomes 2)

SECOND NUMBER = RESULT  (Second is now 3)

RESULT = FIRST NUMBER + SECOND NUMBER 
(Test this as, 2 +3=5            RESULT now equals 5.

FIRST NUMBER = SECOND NUMBER    
(FIRST is now 3)

SECOND NUMBER = RESULT  
(SECOND NUMBER now 5)

RESULT = FIRST NUMBER + SECOND NUMBER    
or 3+5=8)         RESULT has a value of 8.

FIRST NUMBER=SECOND NUMBER   
( FIRST becomes 5)

SECOND NUMBER = RESULT   (8)

RESULT = FIRST NUMBER + SECOND NUMBER 
(Test this as, 5 +8=13     RESULT now equals 13.

This process then continues to infinity  or until 
your printer runs out of ink or paper.  
The clever younger programmer can then add a few
twists to this.  Once he learns how to declare a 
DOWHILE loop, he can command the computer 
to stop this endless process once some kind of 
"counter" variable reaches or exceeds "one thousand" 
printed numbers or some such limit. That way, 
it reaches a stopping point and you won't have to 
pull the plug on your runaway computer.  In coding 
the above example, it becomes clear that it is possible 
to make errors in logic because the variables 
are constantly changing chameleon-like or 
like some Cheshire Cat.  
The "I'm not there anymore" quality of the variables 
can cause you to lose your way, so concentration is 
very necessary.  You can also compress this process 
by looping back after RESULT is made and go back 
to the top of the sequence and proceed through again. 
This saves on a lot of typing at the keyboard. 
Might as well invent some shortcuts!  Finally, computer programming 
teachers will advise the young 
programmer to "de-bug" your 
program by 
stepping through it with a note pad and 
writing down 
the numbers just to see that they change as you 
want them to.  Okay, that's enough demonstrating 
for now.  

Encouraging Your Student

First, it is sometimes necessary to inform 
middle-school and high-school students about 
computer programming and how to approach it 
as a subject.  Tell students that computer 
programming IS NOT math.  Even if it can be used 
to solve math problems, programming is more
a skill and even a craft involving logical thinking, 
organizing and some visual presentation craft.

It is a subject that both boys and girls can become 
excited about once they realize that it becomes 
fun to do and work to complete programs.

One metaphor that can describe programming 
is that of putting an electric train down on a hard floor.  
You lay down tracks for the train to follow.  
In a program, you lay down a track for the computer 
to follow, doing one step after another.  Train sets 
can have other tracks on the side or even inside 
loops of tracks which can be constructed within 
the larger layout.  Programming languages have 
entire lexicons of commands allowing you to 
make use of pre-constructed "tools" that perform 
work in your programs. Students can become 
excited to see how many tricks they can perform.  
If you discover an error in the above logic, 
by all means post your comment to advise of the error.